She and Lysander (David Olaniregun) escape to the nearby woods, followed by her unloved fiancé Demetrius (Lou Jackson) and his own admirer Helena (Tara Tijani,) where they inadvertently get caught up in a dispute between the king and queen of the fairies.
In fact, this isn't another of the umpteen productions that explore the darkness behind the comedy - not a problem in itself as the darkness is unmistakably there, and the best takes can find something gloriously redemptive in what happens next. What it most resembles to me is Joe Hill-Gibbins' production, which like this one effectively dismissed the suggestion that this is a comedy at all, either by cutting most of the comic situations or playing the jokes deliberately flat.
So Sergo Vares' Puck is as malevolent as Michelle Terry's was, but carrying a sense of impending doom rather than one of dark glee. Theseus carries a loaded gun with him at all times and there's little doubt that he would use it at the slightest excuse, his threats of death for disobedience aren't part of an archaic law but very real. Even the rude mechanicals aren't free from the darkness, here recast as catering staff who get relentlessly bullied by the royal couple, but for some reason still choose to perform for them.
Danny Kirrane's angry Bottom is turned into a broken, damaged figure who's always either furious - he screams at an audience member not to laugh at him, just in case anyone was still thinking this might get funny - or terrified. His transformation and affair with Titania is a rare moment of happiness that will be casually taken away from him, and the directors' new ending doesn't go well either for him or Jack Humphrey's Quince.
And while I've seen other dark Dreams - notably Matthew Dunster's - go hard on all the sexual assault in the play, I'm not sure I've ever seen any so explicitly question why exactly Oberon is so desperate to get a child (Pria Kalsi) in his clutches. Marcus' Oberon, much more fun to be around than his Theseus, is regardless a Michael Jackson figure, somewhat innocent and excited at the prospect of sorting out the lovers' predicament. He's not frightening because of any malice, but because a child's mind in a grown adult's body could potentially be very dangerous. In a rare touch of whimsy, Max Johns' designs have dressed all the fairies as ballet dancers, so it's a shame that a show quite so focused on Michael Marcus' arse in ballet tights is the one where he's playing Paedoberon.
I liked the second half better, if only because the lovers' scenes there are so well-written they're hard not to get some laughs out of. But there's also less common takes on the dark side, including one I often question and rarely see addressed: It's often acknowledged that the love potion is magic Rohypnol, but not that Demetrius is left under its influence for the rest of his life at the end of the play. Here Olaniregun's Lysander is a rather likeable doofus turned nasty by the magic, but Jackson's Demetrius is much less pleasant in his usual state, a potentially violent creep who's definitely got a sexual interest in both Hermia and Helena, but seems unlikely to commit to either. When enchanted he's a lot more sweet and likeable, but it's soon apparent that's only because he's been left brain-damaged, weak and frightened by the drug, and that's presumably something he will never recover from.
The approach is certainly bold, but I think apart from a lack of clarity from some of the reshuffling of scenes (including an interesting touch of Robin Starveling being an alter ego of Robin Goodfellow, whom he invents so he can mess with the mechanicals earlier than usual,) my main issue is, as it so often is, that most of these darker concepts are dealt with in many productions. So if the framework is nothing new, then removing all the comedy doesn't actually replace it with much else. On an intellectual level I found a lot of individual ideas interesting to think about, but there's no overall replacement for the usual comic heart of the play.
There's also a lot of rewriting, reordering, and downright replacing of sections with new lines or quotes from other Shakespeare plays (including a big chunk of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech.) I like a canny rewrite to suit the production, and ironically in this humourless version there's one I always think should be rewritten to make the joke work but rarely is*. But I'm even more of a sucker for someone delivering a line I've heard a hundred times and making it sound new, and if the directors can't deliver their interpretation of the text without changing a good third of the dialogue as well as major plot points, you've got to wonder how confident they are in the interpretation in the first place.
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 31st of January at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse; then continuing on tour to Prescot, Leeds, Bristol and Oxford.
Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
*regular readers might both have guessed this is the "do you marry him" joke that will, at best, land very awkwardly as written. Race Roughan and Hayat go with "you go marry him," which even preserves the scansion which I've always assumed to be what's holding people back.
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